Corrupt Academic Lies About Increases in the Minimum Wage

Two academic studies have been made about the effect of Seattle’s minimum wage increase from $9.47 to $15 an hour on food service workers. The increase is taking place over seven years.

A study from Jacob Vigdor of the University of Washington (UW) showed the minimum wage increase was bad for everybody in just about every way. Vigdor, of course, has a clear right-wing political ax to grind. Besides the UW, Vigdor is also a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an institute funded by the Koch brothers and other billionaires opposed to the minimum wage in general. The principal purpose of AEI is to influence public opinion in favor of the billionaires with lies and distortions, as well as truths if possible, disguised as scholarly research papers. It’s all patently propaganda coming from this think tank.

Vigdor has also been a contributing scholar with the Manhatten Institute, another right-wing billionaire-funded so-called think tank, whose principal purpose is the same as the right-wingers at AEI. The sponsors are also opposed to the minimum wage in general.

Quite naturally, the corporate media, both liberal and conservative, reported Vigdor’s negative findings on Seattle’s minimum wage rise as a fact when, in reality, they were fiction. This is how corrupt academia and the corporate news media have become with the influence of billionaire dollars into those fields.

Another, almost completely unreported study of the effects of Seattle’s minimum wage increase from the University of California-Berkeley (UC) showed the exact opposite of Vigdor’s lying propaganda on behalf of Wall Street and other billionaires. Note that the last thing most editors of conservative and liberal news sources, as well as fake news sources such as Fox News, want you to know is that the increase in minimum wages is good for the nation’s economy because it raises the demand for goods and services, rather than provide rising dividends and share prices for billionaire shareholders, which sucks the power out of the economy. That’s why the result of the UC study is unmentionable in the propaganda news media.

According to Michael Reich, lead researcher on the UC team, Vigdor’s research made certain to carefully gerrymander the statistics by omitting nearly half of Seattle’s low paid workers, “by omitting franchises and other businesses with more than one establishment. Seattle’s ordinance is aimed at low-wage, multistate companies, requiring the fastest wage increase to be paid by firms with more than 500 employees worldwide that do not provide health insurance.” In addition, Vigdor’s lying propaganda included only those jobs paying $19 an hour or less in food service, but job gains in higher paid positions in food service far outnumbered job losses in lower paid positions.

What happened? Seattle’s lowest-paid workers began spending their newly raised wages and local businesses began to thrive. When low-wage workers earn more they spend more.

Last February, Marketplace reported that Bill Phelps, CEO of Wetzel’s Pretzels, which grossed $165 million in 2016 from over 300 stores, had opposed minimum wage increases because he feared it would hurt profits, and that sales would fall if he needed to raise prices to compensate. Both times California raised its minimum wage, sales at his California stores immediately shot up. “I was stunned by the business,” Phelps told Marketplace.

This is precisely why all Americans, including wealthy shareholders, have a stake in raising the minimum wage above $15 an hour.

Watch out for the conservative propaganda in which its sole propose is to persuade you of something that benefits the billionaires only and at your expense.

The Rigged Game: Corporate America and A People Betrayed

The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed

Wall Street is up to no good, and has been since 1980, when it took over the Republican Party, and then the Democratic Party in 1994. Income has been massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via legislative scam after scam, from tax cuts for the rich to international income redistribution schemes falsely labeled as trade agreements. In The Rigged Game, John Hively exposes how this has all come about starting with a revolutionary, but simple reality, all recessions begin in the financial markets.